ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform

“No different vendor could conscionable these timeframes of having the infrastructure successful spot to conscionable this urgent request and present a prototype successful little than six months,” ICE says successful the document.

ICE’s papers does not specify the information sources Palantir would propulsion from to powerfulness ImmigrationOS. However, it says that Palantir could “configure” the lawsuit absorption strategy that it has provided to ICE since 2014.

Palantir has done enactment astatine assorted different authorities agencies arsenic aboriginal arsenic 2007. Aside from ICE, it’s worked with the US Army, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. As reported by WIRED, Palantir is presently helping Elon Musk’s alleged Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) physique a marque caller “mega API” astatine the IRS that could hunt for records crossed each the antithetic databases that the bureau maintains.

Last week, 404 Media reported that a caller mentation of Palantir’s lawsuit absorption strategy for ICE allows agents to hunt for radical based connected “hundreds of different, highly circumstantial categories,” including however a idiosyncratic entered the country, their existent ineligible status, and their state of origin. It besides includes a person’s hairsbreadth and oculus color, whether they person scars oregon tattoos, and their licence sheet scholar data, which would supply elaborate determination information astir wherever that idiosyncratic travels by car.

These functionalities person been mentioned successful a authorities privateness appraisal published successful 2016, and it’s not wide what caller accusation whitethorn person been integrated into the lawsuit absorption strategy implicit the past 4 years.

This week’s $30 cardinal grant is an summation to an existing Palantir declaration penned successful 2022, primitively worthy astir $17 million, for enactment connected ICE’s lawsuit absorption system. The bureau has accrued the worth of the declaration 5 times anterior to this month; the largest was a $19 cardinal summation successful September 2023.

The contract’s ImmigrationOS update was archetypal documented connected April 11 successful a government-run database tracking national spending. The introduction had a 248-character statement of the change. The five-page papers ICE published Thursday, meanwhile, has a much elaborate statement of Palantir’s expected services for the agency.

The declaration update comes arsenic the Trump medication deputizes ICE and different authorities agencies to drastically escalate the tactics and standard of deportations from the US. In caller weeks, migration authorities person arrested and detained radical with pupil visas and greenish cards, and deported astatine slightest 238 radical to a brutal megaprison successful El Salvador, immoderate of whom person not been capable to talk with a lawyer oregon person owed process.

As portion of its efforts to propulsion radical to self-deport, DHS successful precocious March revoked the impermanent parole of much than fractional a cardinal radical and demanded that they self-deport successful astir a month, contempt having been granted authorization to unrecorded successful the US aft fleeing unsafe oregon unstable situations successful Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela nether the alleged “CHNV parole programs.”

Last week, the Social Security Administration listed much than 6,000 of these radical arsenic dead, a maneuver meant to extremity their fiscal lives. DHS, meanwhile, sent emails to an chartless fig of radical declaring that their parole had been revoked, and demanding them to self-deport. Several US citizens, including migration attorneys, received the email.

On Monday, a national justice temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s determination to revoke the people’s authorization to unrecorded successful the US nether the CHNV programs. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the judge’s ruling “rogue.”